This story is based upon a working hypothesis about the death of
Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, who died in his
own swimming pool about a month after having been sacked from the group.
The official account of his death has always been treated with
suspicion, not just because of the natural 60s attitude of
disrespect toward authority, or the natural tendency to assume
cover-ups and seek conspiracies when celebrity deaths are involved,
but because some things just didn't make a lot of sense. Jones
drowned in an relatively small, warm swimming pool when he had
very little in the way of drugs or alcohol in his system, and despite the fact that he
was a championship-caliber swimmer. The coroner ruled it a "death by
misadventure," whatever that means. I think it means, "He's a
rock star and he destroyed himself. That's what they do, isn't it?"

The writers and director acquired the rights to four books about
the end of Jones's life, including the account of his girlfriend,
Anna Wohlin, who was at the estate the night he drowned, and helped
fish him from the pool. They went one step farther. Another woman
was present at the estate that night, a nurse who had promptly
disappeared from the public eye for forty years until these
filmmakers hired a private detective to track her down and give her
side of the story, which had never been told since the perfunctory
contemporaneous police investigation. Only when the authors
felt that they had a story which conformed to all the reports in all
their sources, and reflected the accounts of all the eyewitnesses, did they assemble this script. You have to give them credit for a
story well researched. Is it true? I don't believe we will ever know
for sure, but it is plausible.

The director also assembled a cast which evoked the cast of real
characters, and employed a cinematographer who went to a great deal
of time and trouble to capture the feel of the 60s with period
equipment and film stock. In fact, he used many different lenses and
film stocks to create different moods in different contexts, and to
help the audience navigate through the labyrinth of times and places
which form the back-story.

So, the director, writer and cinematographer put a lot of careful
effort into a film about my favorite rock group. Why the hell didn't
I actually enjoy the film? A few reasons:

1. The film is over-produced. Too many different cinematographic
tricks, too much arty editing, flashbacks within flashbacks - like
the work of a film school senior trying to demonstrate the breadth
of his mastery, but at the expense of coherence, entertainment, and narrative.

2. Although the film does finally offer some interesting insight
on the mystery of Brian's death, it takes 84 minutes before it even
lets on that there IS a mystery. Given the framing structure of the
film, I was led to believe that the flashback story was going to
explain the psychological deterioration of the principal that led
him to an excessive lifestyle, hence deathstyle. You know, your
basic "drugs suck" movie. Turns out it has a completely different
story to tell, but takes a very long time to get to it. Too long, in
my opinion, and too little energy is expended on the way.

3. This point is the deal-breaker. It's a film about the Rolling
Stones, but the filmmakers couldn't acquire the rights to the Stones
major hits of the period. As a result, the director had to resort to
a few atmospheric scenes of the boys covering old blues standards
(as they actually did in the inchoate stages of the band's
development), plus one cover version of "Time
Is On My Side," and some other period songs. Saddest of all, the
other songs were not always appropriate. For example, "White Rabbit"
is the soundtrack for a drug-taking scene in 1965. Oops! Not only
has that song turned into a dead horse in general, best avoided
completely because it's an instant 60s cliché, but it is a 1967 dead
horse, the music of a substantially different musical era, one which
had not begun in 1965.

Hollywood Reporter hit it right on the head in their review - the
film has plenty of sex and drugs, but no rock 'n roll. (And, for
that matter, too much of the sex is on grainy retro film stock, at
least for my taste.) That left me
with the same feeling about this film that I had about that Sylvia
Plath biopic with Gwyneth Paltrow. Both films had some good
production values and performances, but you shouldn't make a Sylvia
Plath film without permission to use her poems, and you shouldn't
make a Rolling Stones film with Jefferson Airplane music. That's
just wrong.

NOTE on the DVD: Although I thought the
movie to be so-so at best, I found the Region 2 DVD excellent. Since the
story is a controversial take on a true story, you would hope that
the film's creators would discuss that, and that's just what they
do. There is a full-length commentary, an excellent "making-of", and
many, many deleted scenes.

The casting of the famous people in this film was quite reasonable,
but the casting of the mysterious Frank Thorogood, the contractor who
lived above Brian's garage, was not appropriate. The actor, Paddy
Considine, is a reasonably handsome man who was 30 when this film was
made. (He's the guy who played the dad in In America.) The real
Thorogood was a grotesquely ugly 44 year old man. (Pictured to the
right.) If that role had been cast with an appropriate actor - say
Timothy Spall with a bald head, one eye, and a pencil-thin moustache -
the relationship between Brian Jones and Thorogood would have been
much easier to understand. Imagine the guy to the right palling around
with hunky superstar, and you can imagine what the chemistry should
have been, and how humiliating some of Jones's mind games must have
been for the poor schlub.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics,
or a C- from our system.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

Our own
guideline:

A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.

B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better
is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at
least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial
success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with
good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the
critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also
assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the
box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of
the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people
had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)

C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of
movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are
indistinguishable to you.

C
means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who
like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others
probably will not.

C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film
rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of
film, but films with this rating should be approached with
caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent
or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C-
and an E are indistinguishable to you.

D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. We don't score films below C- that
often, because we like movies and we think that most of them
have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that,
you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-.
Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor
popular acceptance.

E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre.

F means that the film is not only unappealing
across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, this
film is a C-. It is a watchable
movie, but it's one of those where you are constantly haunted by
disappointment, because it should have been great. Make it more
viewer-friendly, add the Stones' music, and this could have been
a contenda.